GenresFiction
War & Military
Combat, aftermath, and the home front.
War fiction has a subject so large that the book has to choose a corner of it or disappear. A unit, a ship, a street, a hospital, a kitchen on the home front: the scale of one life is usually how a reader can bear the scale of the event. Research is not optional. Readers of this genre often know the history, and they can tell when a battle has been assembled from films.
You also don't have to write the most famous day of the most famous war. Aftermath is a war story. So is the long boredom, the bad food, the letter that doesn't arrive, the skill of staying afraid for months. Heroism is allowed, and so is the absence of it. What tends to fail is a book that treats soldiers as a type, or civilians as a backdrop. Everyone in the war is having a particular day. Write that day.
The kinds of book inside it
Combat
The fighting is central, so the tactics and the fear both need to be concrete, and the reader should be able to follow where everyone is.
Home front
The war arrives as shortage, rumour, work, and waiting, and the people who never see a battlefield are still inside the story.
Veteran
The book is about what remains after the uniform comes off, which is often harder to dramatise and just as important.
Naval
Life on a ship is crowded, hierarchical, and at the mercy of weather and orders, which gives you a world small enough to know.
When you want a first sketch, Storywell can draft a story summary in this vein. You are still the one who writes the book. Compose an idea.